Thursday, 4 May 2017

SongKong 4.8 released with improved iTunes and MinimServer support

SongKong 4.8 released with many new features for iTunes and MinimServer

We have some exciting new features in the latest SongKong release plus a number of fixes, here we list the highlights.

Support for Arm32 Linux installations

The Arm32 chipset is often used on embedded and specialist architectures. For the most part SongKong has supported all flavours of Linux, but the audio fingerprinting component was not supported for arm32 chips, but now it is.

Support for adding WAV metadata to iTunes

SongKong and iTunes have both supported the WAV format for some time and SongKong has always had support for informing iTunes of changes made so that iTunes can update its metadata with the latest details from SongKong.

However iTunes doesn't understand that metadata can be added to WAV files so it ignores the metadata added. When editing within iTunes itself it stores only in the iTunes library not the file itself.

We have now improved SongKong iTunes integration so that for Wav files it updates the iTunes library itself preserving the metadata added by SongKong into iTunes seamlessly.

Better MinimServer Work and Group Support

We have been working to get SongKong working as seamlessly as possible with the MinimServer UPnP server.

As part of this we have now added a new Group field. This works in a very similar way to the Work field we already support in iTunes and allows movements of a work to be grouped within MinimServer this works immediately with MinimServer without any MinimServer configuration required.

We have also added an Overall_Work field that can be used to browse by the overall work composition. This is often the same as the Group field, but not always. For example in an Opera tracks are grouped at the Act or Scene level but the overall work would contain the name of the Opera itself. This can be used in MinimServer by simply adding overall_work to MinimServers indexTags settings.

There is also a new Instrument field that can be used to index songs by the instruments played by the listed performers. Again configure by adding the MinimServer's indexTags field.

Of course all these new fields can be used in many ways by many applications, their use is not confined to MinimServer.

The full list of over twenty improvements and fixes can be found on the News page